With John Ridewall’s Fulgencius Metaforalis, published by Liverpool University Press in its Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies series, Ralph Hanna fills a lacuna among critical editions and translations of late medieval mythographic texts, thereby providing students and scholars access to this primary resource.
Much of what we know of the mythographer Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (fl. late fifth century-early sixth century), and of his English commentator John Ridewall (fl. 1330-40), is primarily gleaned in each case from passing remarks in and inferences from their writings. Likely north African in origin, Fulgentius was Christian, educated, knew Greek, and was possibly agrammaticus, rhetor, or held some other professional role in the late-antique world of the western Roman empire and/or its immediate aftermath. In addition toMythologiae (Mythologies), he authored Expositio continentiae Virgilianae secundum philosophos moralis (An Exposition of the Content of Virgil According to Moral Philosophy),Expositio sermonum antiquorum (An Explanation of Obsolete Words), and De aetatibus mundi et hominis (On the Ages of the World and of Man). His Mythologies—a series of fifty brief stories and their allegorical interpretations, arranged in three books each with a prologue (Book 1 has 22 stories; 2,16; and 3,12)—summarized and interpreted Greco-Roman myths for his immediate audience (an unnamed dominus) and became a source of classical figures, stories, and interpretations for subsequent generations of readers and writers: a part of the late-antique inheritance in western Europe throughout the medieval and into the early modern periods. [1] One such reader in fourteenth-century England was John Ridewall, who took up Mythologies to reinterpret stories from books one and two for his own contemporaries: his Fulgencius Metaforalis (FM). Ridewall, a Franciscan friar and one-time regent master of the Oxford Franciscans, wrote biblical commentaries, a commentary on Augustine’s De civitate Dei and another on Walter Map’s Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum as well as FM. Likely composed during his time in Oxford, this latter work—perhaps Ridewall’s most widely known commentary—is extant in whole in fourteen fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and in part in eighty-one more.
As part of a long practice of engaging relics from past cultures, Ridewall’s FM offers an example of how late medieval commentators might approach materials from antiquity and, in a sense, translate them for contemporaries. In the Latin west of the Middle Ages, elements of Greco-Roman culture survived in part through medieval people adapting and transforming them into something new. Masons, for instance, repurposed stones from Roman structures like Hadrian’s wall when building churches; historical writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth drew on figures like Aeneas to posit a people’s ancestral line of descent from ancient Troy; poets such as Jean de Meun employed Roman deities like Venus and Genius to explore the human experience of love; and so on. Fulgentius himself does something similar in Mythologies. Drawing on Roman habits of mind that considered stories of the divine in terms of historical, natural, or moral phenomena (ideas perhaps most succinctly articulated by Cicero in De natura deorum), Fulgentius retells and then interprets the text’s fifty stories in euhemeristic (historical), physical (natural), and ethical (moral) terms. For example, in the first story of book one, he posits the origin of idolatry in an historical event of a father’s grief who, upon losing his son, set up an effigy to venerate him; in the third story of book one, he explicates Jove and Juno naturally as figures naming the elements fire and air respectively; and in the first story of book two, he recounts the Judgment of Paris in terms of moral allegory, positing that the goddesses Minerva, Juno, and Venus represent in turn three contrary ways of life open to human beings: contemplative, active, and pleasure-seeking. Offering multiple modes of interpreting Greco-Roman myth, Fulgentius bequeaths both versions of the myths themselves and ways of reading them to his immediate audience and to subsequent readers like Ridewall.
Working with book one and the first story from book two of Mythologies, Ridewall, for his part, recasts Fulgentius presumably for an audience of fellow friars seeking illustrative homiletic materials, thereby offering readings of the first twenty-three stories from Fulgentius’s text. Though he follows Fulgentius’s order of tales, in book one he focuses on single figures to illustrate a virtue or vice, which leads him at times to treat several myths in a single chapter. InFM’s chapter six of book one, for instance, Ridewall synthesizes seven of Fulgentius’s stories (Mythologies 1.5-11) under the figure Pluto to illustrate the virtue providentia (foresight). Similarly, in chapter seven, he synthesizes five stories (Mythologies 1.12-15, 17) under Apollo to illustrate the virtue veritas (truth). In book two he shifts from virtues and vices as an organizing ordinatio and expands the Judgment of Paris myth and commentary from one story (Mythologies 2.1) into four chapters to more fully explicate the three ways of life (FM 2.1-4).
Whether synthesizing, amplifying, or retaining Fulgentius’s focus, Ridewall’s overarching concern is how these figures and stories illustrate aspects of moral living. His mode of presentation, then, is less narrative and more iconographic as he describes each figure visually and then explicates the visual elements point-by-point (his oft-repeated verb pingitur and noun pictura are telling). To illustrate, chapter eight of book one centers on Phaeton as an instance of the vice of ambition. Here, Ridewall teases out twelve elements of Phaeton’s portrait that emerge from his story to underscore the dangers of ambition: the problems and ultimate destruction that result from overreach beyond one’s station or abilities as a human being. This methodical approach, articulated in several points and presented in clear Anglo-Latin, belies the occasional challenge of reading Fulgentius’ late-fifth century Latin prose—not the easiest of Latin texts—and suggests two concerns Ridewall implicitly has for his immediate audience: clarity of thought and clarity of expression.
Along with interpretations of Fulgentius in particular, FM also illustrates Ridewall’s reading habits more broadly as he regularly cites, by name and/or title in most cases, other writers as he explicates the respective virtues and vices formulating his subject. In the Phaeton chapter alone, for example, Ridewall quotes, summarizes and paraphrases Ovid, Chrysostom, Roger Bacon, Innocent III, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of Fouilly, Gregory the Great, Boethius, and Augustine as well as several biblical passages. The wide-ranging reading evident here and throughout FM illustrates Ridewall’s habit of mind as he marshals his reading of others so as to lead his readers into an understanding of Fulgentius’s text.
Hanna’s is not the first modern edition of FM. In 1926, Hans Liebeschütz included a critical edition of the first six books in his discussion of medieval mythography based on a partial copy of Ridewall’s text (the full text was unavailable to him). [2] Except for the fourteen extant manuscript copies in various European libraries, Liebeschütz’s solid edition of the text through the Pluto chapter is what students and scholars have had at hand for nearly a century. With Hanna’s critical edition and English translation, we now have before us a full treatment of FM, which he presents in seven sections: an introduction and bibliography; the text and translation; an appendix of two interpolated passages; textual commentary; a medieval tabula; a final summative commentary; and two indices.
In the introduction, Hanna presents clearly the kinds of information that we have come to expect from an introductory document in a book like this one: a review of Ridewall’s life, a discussion ofFM and its dissemination in late medieval Europe, an interpretive essay reviewing the text’s use and influence, a discussion of the author’s sources as evident from the text, and a careful review of how he approached editing in this case. He appends to this introduction a series of notes on the manuscripts he used to develop this critical edition and includes a two-part bibliography delineating primary and secondary sources informing his introduction, edition, translation, and commentaries. Though brief because he deals with the subject particularly in the subsequent textual commentary and in a 2021 article, his note on Ridewall’s reading is suggestive and intriguing as he posits Ridewall’s “tactile familiarity with an extensive and varied library collection,” which he later concludes was “presumably that at Oxford Greyfriars” (14). [3] Suggestive observations like this here and in the commentaries remind us yet again in the twenty-first century of an important result and value of humanistic study: the medieval authors whose texts we read and study lived and wrote at a specific time and place, and our reading of their texts ever-so-slightly opens space for us to imagine them with book and pen in hand. Hanna’s explication of Ridewall’s sources and reading habits hints at, even reveals, an active, creative human being at work in 1330s Oxford.
The heart of the book, of course, is the edition and its facing-page translation. Here, Hanna keeps his own readers in mind as he—and the production staff at Liverpool University Press—carefully present the text for ease of reading, access, and citation. For one thing, he enumerates sections—books, chapters, subsections—and the Latin prose throughout the text so that should one wish to cite Ridewall’s treatment of a subject, say Neptune’s marriage, one need only note its location in book one, chapter five, lines 240-59 and cite 1.5.240-59. The line numbering also keys the facing-page translation, which as a straightforward rendering of the Latin text serves as an aid for those needing help with the original. For readers interested in editing questions, Hanna footnotes variants from the manuscripts on each page of the Latin text; and for those interested in Ridewall’s use of sources, he footnotes them on each page of the English translation. Hanna reinforces his footnotes with the commentary section following the text, where he overviews Ridewall’s use of Fulgentius and other sources in chapter headnotes as well as addresses specific textual questions and phrasing keyed by line number. Hanna rounds out the modern textual aids he provides with two indices citing sources by book, chapter, and line: one dealing with biblical texts and the other with non-biblical texts. Perusing the latter particularly reinforces in list form one’s sense of Ridewall’s wide-ranging familiarity with auctoritates evident when reading the text. Perhaps most distinctive is Hanna’s inclusion of an edition of a medieval tabula: a type of index, by alphabet in this case, “to aid a user seeking provocative moralitates or integumina, not immediately identifiable as associated with any particular mythographic detail” (416). As an illustration of a late-medieval way of reading the text, Hanna concludes, “one supposes that this indexer seeks to aid preachers pursuing materials for the exemplaristic amplification of sermon topics” (416). Following thetabula edition, Hanna adds what he titles “A brief commentary,” in which he works to answer an implicit question Ridewall’s text raises: why does the author organize his material in book one, particularly, around virtues and vices? Placing FM within the context of medieval ideas of ethics current in fourteenth-century Oxford, Hanna reviews Ridewall’s engagement with Ciceronian virtues (cardinal) and Aristotelean ideas of virtue as moderation (and vices as opposing extremes of moderation) as a “historicist gesture,” concluding,
“If mythography truly underpins moral philosophy through an
integumen that the poets intended, those authors could only
describe those virtues and vices known to them, that is the
cardinals. Further, they could only generally describe their
operations through equally contemporary theory, Aristotle’s
Nicomachaean Ethics on the mean (moderation or ordinatio). Such
theory is to be instantiated through ‘metaphor’, the conventional
preacherly use of simultudinous argument” (431).
Hanna, who has published editions for the Early English Text Society and the Scottish Text Society as well as the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies series, with this book adds another excellent and accessible critical edition of an important medieval text to our modern library. The copy I have had for review is presented in a sturdy 16cm x 24cm hardcover format with a reduced image (to 51%) on its front cover of folio 132r from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 571, the chief manuscript upon which Hanna bases his text. Though not discussed directly, this image offers a brief glimpse for the curious of the manuscript’s script, layout, and ordinatio. In addition to hardcover, Fulgencius Metaforalis is also available from Liverpool University Press in paperback, PDF copy, and ePUB copy. Hanna, the series editors of EMTS, and Liverpool University Press are to be commended. I recommend the book to students and scholars working in late medieval mythography, intellectual history, sermon studies, Anglo-Latin, and poetics and to libraries supporting their work.
--------
Notes:
1. Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, Mitologiarum Libri Tres, Opera, ed. Rudolf Helms (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898), pp. 1-80. For an accessible translation, see Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, The Mythologies, Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Leslie George Whitbread (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp. 39-102.
2. Hans Liebeschütz, Fulgentius Metaforalis: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antiken Mythologie im Mittelalter (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926).
3. Ralph Hanna, “Lost Libraries: The Case of the Oxford Franciscans, c. 1330-40,” Journal of the Early Book Society,24 (2021): 37-60.